InfoQ published Pauline Jepp's QCon San Francisco talk on engineering leadership, and one practical detail in it is the thing I want to pass on. Her team at TicketSwap wrote mentoring, coaching, and pair programming into the career development plan an engineer has to meet to progress to the next level. In her words, we want them to take on some mentoring tasks and coaching, pair programming.
It sounds small. I think it is one of the more important structural choices a team can make, because of what happens when it is absent.
Every career ladder I have seen rewards visible individual output: features shipped, systems designed, incidents resolved. The work that makes a team function, especially a new or distributed one, is different. Onboarding the new hire. Pairing with the engineer in another time zone who is stuck. Reviewing carefully instead of quickly. Explaining the system for the fourth time. None of that produces a line on a promotion packet, so it goes to volunteers, and the volunteers are the people who care most and get promoted least.
Writing it into the ladder changes that. It says the glue work is the job, not a favor, and it gives the people who do it a way to be recognized for it.
My view is that a team that wants mentoring to happen has to pay for it in the only currency a career ladder has. Everything else is asking for volunteers.
Does mentoring count toward promotion on your team, in writing?
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/cumberland-island